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New Alpha Release: Tor Browser for Android

Mobile browsing is on the rise around the world, and in some parts, it is commonly the only way people access the internet. In these same areas, there is often heavy surveillance and censorship online, so in the past year, we’ve focused on better supporting these users.

There’s never been an official Tor Browser on mobile. Until now.

Introducing Tor Browser for Android (alpha), the mobile browser with the highest privacy protections ever available and on par with Tor Browser for desktop. You can download the alpha release on GooglePlay, or you can get the apk directly from our download page. The stable release is slated for early 2019.

Note: For this release, you also need to install Orbot, a proxy application that will connect Tor Browser for Android with the Tor network. For the upcoming Tor Browser for Android stable release, our goal is for Orbot not to be necessary to connect to Tor.

Features

BLOCK TRACKERS

DEFEND AGAINST SURVEILLANCE

Prevent someone watching your connection from knowing what websites you visit. All anyone monitoring your browsing habits can see is that you’re using Tor.

RESIST FINGERPRINTING

Tor aims to make all users look the same, so Tor Browser for Android makes it difficult for you to be fingerprinted based on your browser and device information.

MULTI-LAYERED ENCRYPTION

When you use Tor Browser for Android, your traffic is relayed and encrypted three times as it passes over the Tor network. The network is comprised of thousands of volunteer-run servers known as Tor relays. Watch this animation to learn more about how it works.

BROWSE FREELY

With Tor Browser for Android, you are free to access sites your local internet service provider may have blocked.

What about Orfox?

We're grateful to the Guardian Project for their work developing Orfox, a mobile browser which routes your traffic over the Tor network. With the development of Tor Browser for Android, Orfox will be sunsetted around the time of our stable release, expected in early 2019. You will still be able to use Orbot to route the traffic of all your other apps on Android over Tor.

What about iOS?

There is no official Tor Browser for iOS devices, but we recommend Onion Browser, developed by Mike Tigas.

Help us Improve

Known issue: Our Security Slider is now under ‘Security Settings,’ but because of a small issue, it’s only showing up after you restart the app. We plan on fixing it for the next release.

This is our first version of Tor Browser for Android, so there may be more bugs than usual. If you find a bug or have a suggestion for how we could improve these changes, please let us know. There are several ways you can reach us with feedback about this alpha including commenting on this post, emailing us at frontdesk@torproject.org, or contacting the developers at the tbb-dev mailing list. We track all Tor Browser for Android related issues with the tbb-mobile keyword in our bug tracker and are happy with bug reports, there, too.

Be sure to include as many of these as possible:

• Your Android version
• Tor Browser version
• Step by step of how you got to the issue, so we can reproduce it (e.g. I opened the browser, typed a url, clicked on (i) icon, then my browser crashed)
• The debug log
• A descriptive subject line (if you're emailing us)

Releasing this app on F-Droid is more complicated than uploading onto the website and using Google Play. We do want it to be available from F-Droid in the future, but this will take some time and it wasn't a high priority for the first alpha release. Thanks for your interest in it!

Yes, we plan to provide similar protections as we have for desktop. For the screen size we have https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/27083. The plan is to shrink the gap between desktop and mobile defenses against tracking with each alpha release and provide the same with the first stable mobile version.

I use TOR for political activity on Facebook and Twitter, ... in a dictatorship country, I need the best and the safest settings to apply in TOR desktop version to give me better feel, because I'm worried about the country's thought police and their IT experts, not to trace my activities. Many people like to use TOR, but they worry and don't know the safest settings and useful tips to save them from governmental spies. I know how to work with Tor and checked its settings out, but I need some advice from a Tor expert to give me some guides about privacy and security settings.
Another question I have doubt about it is, Is it safe to use Tor with a VPN program? Is it safe? For getting better safety, Is it good to use another VPN with Tor or not? some guys answer yes, some say no! I'm confused.
Sorry, I ask this question here that is not related to this post, but I need a quick answer and it's vital for me and some people who use Tor for political activity and journalists who I know them and I want to help them as well.

Second, if you do not already use Tails you should definitely try to obtain and use the current version, Tails 3.9:

tails.boum.org

Tails is an "amnesiac" OS which you boot from a USB or DVD and which will enable you to write documents, etc., as well as to surf over the Tor network using the latest Tor Browser, to access onion sites, etc. "Amnesiac" means Tails leaves no traces on your hard drive; you store documents you need to keep, seriously encrypted, in a special way on the USB or in removable encrypted media which are more easily hidden or destroyed in an emergency. It is ideal for journalism or political activity in dangerous countries (which these days can mean almost any country).

Third, I believe that some Tor Project employees can put you in touch with people who can give you the best current county-specific advice on using Tor, so the best thing would be for you to contact them if that can be done safely. I thought Tor Messenger was very promising precisely to establish such critical initial contact with someone in a dangerous country, but unfortunately Tor Messenger's funding has been pulled and it never got out of beta testing.

Email is not safe but may be your only option.

Riseup.net is a wonderul collective offers email accounts to people other than Nazis and human traffickers and people of that sort

o are in the USA, which may have "intelligence sharing agreement" with your country (assuming it is not USA),

o have been targeted by Hacking Team

o have been seized at least once by FBI (which got nothing and failed to shut down Riseup on that occasion),

o have been targeted with at least one NSL which was initially secret, but Riseup says the information they got was limited to a few accounts only.

This is not encouraging, but nonetheless Riseup may be your best option.

Riseup.net asks users to donate but understands it may be difficult for people who live in dangerous country to safely donate money. Riseup offers a VPN but I don't know how dangerous this would be to try to use from inside your country. To obtain an email account (and access to the VPN), someone who knows you and already has an account needs to vouch for you (because Riseup needs to try to keep genuinely criminal activity off their network). Note that Riseup offers services in several major languages.

o USG has just declared that the ICC is "illegitimate" and that USG intends to neutralize anyone who supports ICC activities (with a strong hint that this project includes CIA kidnappings and secret renditions to places of evil repute):

We cannot let these developments dissuade us from fighting for human rights everywhere and however we can, but this does appear to imply that leading human rights organizations like Riseup, Tor Project, EFF, ACLU, HRW, Amnesty, RSF, CPJ are now in even greater danger of being declared illegal by USG or even prosecuted.

You mentioned the need for haste. In generally, doing things quickly is bad for cybersecurity but in many cases there is no other choice.

Suggestions not directly responsive to your question, but likely to be valuable nonetheless:

One basic strategy to consider, taking account of country-specific "norms" and what "The Authorities" might view as particularly suspicious, is using two or more devices for different roles.

For example, you might have a PC and printer in your home, but use a smart phone when covering street protests or meeting with sources. If so, when you are outside your home, you might use the new Tor for Android for urgent messages, to set up meetings, etc. (You might use a second smart phone in "monitor mode" for countersurveillance in the field, unless using two phones will look strange in your country.) When you are working at home, you might boot Tails from a DVD for further research on the internet, keeping files you download on an encrypted USB stick. To write your story, you might reboot Tails from a USB stick, with networking disabled but with your persistent storage enabled, for extra security while you prepare your document.

In general, it is best to try to keep anything you want to access in future on strongly encrypted removable media. The default is AES which is becoming worrisome because it so old, and critical features of AES are not yet well understood by the public cryptographic community.

Because different activities and different media engage different Threat Models, it is best to use a small number of different media devices for these different roles, ideally using different strong passphrases, ideally ones you have memorized. EFF's diceware offers a good way to construct long but memorable passphrases with known entropy. Unfortunately, with quantum computing now upon us (or nearly so), you need long passphrases.

o pseudo-random number generator in Tails booted from DVD (less likely that someone who subjects your computer to NSA-quality media recovery will be able to find the random seed you used but you should give the computer enough time to collect good entropy--- if you have trouble generating a long gpg key this is a warning that you probably cannot use this method),

o commercial entropy key (but tests suggest these do not produce good entropy, possibly because NSA likes it that way),

o off-line non-computer generation of entropy such as Diceware (but tests suggest cheap dice do not produce good entropy, possibly because NSA likes it that way).

Some people like to use all of these in an entropy smorgasbord.

You can find applications at CRAN and in Debian which generate Diceware passphrases from simulated dice throws. This is a convenient way to get a feel for what kinds of memorization training you will need.

To intelligently generate passphrases you need to start with a threat model such as this:

Diceware uses a wordlist with random choices made using pentathrows (five dice):

There are 6^5 = 7776 possible pentathrows, so we compute how many words we need like this:

7776^6 = 2 E23 (good enough for 2013?)

7776^7 = 2 E27 (good enough for 2018?)

But rattling five cubical dice in a box, as Micah Lee recommends, appears to result in like faces sticking together, which very drastically reduces the entropy. Because cheap playing dice are not likely to be adequate for our needs, some people use a computer which they never connect to another device, but use only to generate simulated pentathrows, regularly checking with tools like dieharder the quality of the entropy output by R's default pseudo-random number generator (Mersenne twister, which is much better than the generators which your OS probably uses).

Me too was very confused when I required to some expert about the uses of TOR (By Mobile I am saying) added to a VPN.Well ,I have tried more VPN during its own free treal and more or less are all fine working added to Orbot and TBB , obviously data connection is very slow and here is the problem. More slow is a connection and more possibilities there are for MITM attack.So in my opinion especially if you are using socials like Facebook and Twitter ,it may be a good idea speaking to the teams of the Vpns before posting through vpn+orbot+tbb on a social network ,even if you means Facebook onion link and Twitter behind proxy.In both they requires your phone number or ,the code for login is directly sent on your isp messaging app.There are free chat about vpn teams with which you can ask anything from your browser, they are all gentlemen or ladies,I suggest you to chat with them behind a vpn ,not for them,but for your isp ,especially considering the fact that you are living in a Country very well under contoll; from what you have posted and I am understanding. Right? Best regards ☺

You can switch your circuit by clicking on the "i" icon (identity box) on the left site of the URL bar as the 8.0 release blog post, the onboarding in the upper left corner of your starting page and the update notice (in case you updated) on the first page after the update explain.

for some reason the add on tab used be able to search the add on the in the serach field now it pop up new window and shows you the add on based on the serach in the firefox add on site now. used to be able to query the list in the tor browser what is happening?

This is a huge advance for billions of people all over the world, because so many ordinary citizens (and all are at risk from govt/corp surveillance) use either Google or Microsoft smart phones, and now they can protect their friends and family with Tor!

(Tsigas has worked as a tech expert for ProPublica, so even though his TorBrowser is not offically part of the Tor Project, I think its trustworthy.)

Thanks to all who are working on this, and best wishes for future development and adoption at scale. I hope TP's media team is reaching out to reporters at TheRegister, Wired, Arstechnica, The Guardian, The Intercept, to try to ensure that people all over the globe are aware that they can easily protect themselves by using Tor on two of the most widely used smart phones. I'd name media outlets in India, South Asia, Africa, and Latin America, but I'm not sure how many people use these brands of phone there, or which papers if any are courageous enough to popularize Tor usage. But I sense that at least in India and some parts of South America there are enormous opportunities to grow the Tor community and I hope this achievement can be part of how we do that.

Please don't require root for tor.There are so many android phones and tablets that finding a root method, other than kingroot or kingoroot or something like those apps, is impossible for all of them. If Tor browser for Android will require root some people may not be able to use tor anymore. Everyone can get an Android phone/tablet not everyone can root them, I would say it's better to not require root access.